Her Perfect Life

by Hinze, Vicki

He had a great voice, silky smooth and easy on the ear. And watching him, it was easy to see that he played from the soul. Neither her side of the family nor Sam’s was known for musical talent. Apparently both sides had saved up their shares and given them all to Jake.

  “That’s beautiful, Jake.” She swept back her hair and smiled at him.

  “Thanks.” He tilted his head as she did, and a flash of her own familiar expression reflected in his.

  “Last bulb,” Molly called out. She moved four inches over and dug four-inches down, then seated the bulb and carefully covered it with dirt. “Yes!”

  Katie smiled. Molly was so precise, Katie expected any second she’d ask for a ruler to get the bulbs planted at exactly equal distances apart. Instead, she’d used her hand to measure. Katie had seen Sam do that same thing a million times.

  It was comforting to see bits of Sam and her in the kids. To know that even during the time she’d been buried, those parts of her had not been forgotten or left behind.

  C.D. grilled some burgers to go with the potato salad and ears of sweet corn they’d picked up at the store when getting the kids, and they all settled down on a blanket in the backyard for a picnic supper.

  Molly reached for a plate and realized she hadn’t washed her hands. “Oh, gee. I’ll be back.”

  Molly, Jake and C.D. were totally at ease with one another, and now Katie was at ease with them, as well. And once again, she silently thanked Blair for having her and C.D. over to dinner. That’s when she and Jake had turned the corner in their relationship, and Katie suspected that Jake had opened the door for Molly, though she and Katie still had a long way to go.

  C.D. buttered another ear of corn. “Molly’s taking a long time, Katie. Want me to run see—”

  “I’ll check on her.” Katie stood up and went into the cottage through the back door.

  Molly sat on the floor in the living room. Spread across her lap was the tattered flight suit Katie had worn at the prison camp. “Molly, what are you doing, honey?”

  Serious, sober and unsmiling, she looked up at her mother. “Did you wear this all the time you were gone?”

  Katie didn’t know what to say. She refused to lie to Molly, but there was something frightening in her tone, in the stillness in her. Katie didn’t want to upset her, or make things harder for her. She didn’t know what was best to do. How frank should she be with the kids about these things? How much was too much, especially for a sensitive child? Yet if Jake was right and Molly was as attuned to energy imprints as Katie’s mother, then Molly already knew the truth and this was a test to see if Katie would be honest with her.

  “Did they make you wear it all the time?” Molly asked again. “Even when it was really hot?”

  “It was really hot most of the time,” Katie said softly. “That’s why I get cold so easily here.” Katie sat down on the floor beside her. “And I didn’t wear that all the time, but some of the time, yes.”

  Molly stared into Katie’s eyes. “You wore it most of the time.”

  “Yes, most of the time,” she confessed. “Why do you have it?” It’d been in the closet inside a box.

  “I need to know if what I saw at the hospital—when Jake and I first came to see you—if that was true,” she explained. “That’s why I hid from you. You were scared and it made me scared.”

  “Is that what you saw?” Katie asked, grasping to understand.

  Molly nodded and slid her fingers through the frayed tears in the back. Slashes where Ustead’s whip had sliced through the fabric and into Katie’s back. She studied them a long time, then frowned at Katie. “Jake said they hurt you there.”

  Katie’s vision blurred, and she blinked hard. “Yes. But it’s over now, Molly. Let’s don’t talk about it. Let’s have a good day.”

  She didn’t move, just fingered the fabric. “You don’t have to lie to me just because I’m a kid.”

  “Honey, I haven’t lied to you, and I won’t. Ever.” Katie let her hear the truth in her voice, and took the flight suit from her, then shoved it under the sofa, out of sight. “I just don’t want any of that to touch you. I don’t want you to think about those things.”

  “Why?” Molly stared at her. “You think about them, don’t you?”

  “That’s different. I’m a grown up. I made choices…”

  “Daddy says they tortured you. Jake said so, too.” Molly looked Katie right in the eye. “Is that true?”

  Tenacious. But these weren’t idle questions, and Molly’s expression proved it. Katie’s answer would set the tone of their relationship. Be honest. Just be honest. Not graphic, but honest. “Yes.”

  “How did you stand it?”

  “It was hard, but I didn’t have any choice. I had to stand it.” Katie pulled in a shuddery breath. “Sometimes, I’d just try to get through a hour because a day seemed too long. Sometimes I’d pray to just get through a minute because an hour seemed too long. I guess I got through it a little bit at a time, honey.”

  “What did you do when a minute seemed too long?”

  So insightful, to know that there were many times when a minute had seemed like a dozen lifetimes. Katie let her daughter see the ravages of pain that scarred her soul. “I’d ask for a second. Just for one second.”

  “I knew they’d tortured you,” she said. “The blood on the back is yours. I knew it when I touched it.”

  Her stomach sank and Katie frowned. “Molly, are you like Grandma Grace?” Her mother had been amazingly psychic. Eerily psychic and consistently tested off the scale, trying to prove to her father her gift was real and proven by science. He ignored the evidence because it was easier than accepting what he didn’t understand.

  Molly shrugged. “I know things. I’m not sure how, I just do.”

  Was that a blessing or a curse for her? For Katie’s mom, seeing her daughter in the tribal prison had pushed her beyond endurance and over the edge into dementia. Or to a place where she welcomed it to escape the horrors inside her mind. “Does your dad know that?”

  “No, but my mom… does.” She sighed. “Dad only likes science you can explain.”

  Boy, did he. He’d always been wary of Katie’s mom because of her gift. “Does knowing things frighten you?”

  “No.” She cocked her head. “It’s not weird to me. It’s just normal.” She rubbed at her nose with the heel of her hand. “Until Daddy got upset, I thought everybody knew things.”

  Katie smiled. “I didn’t mean that you know things, honey. I meant the things you know. Do those things scare you?”

  “No.” Her eyes were far older than her years. “Mostly it’s just funny or sad.” She stood up and started to walk toward the door, then stopped and turned back to Katie, still sitting on the floor. “Is it wrong for me to love you and Blair?”

  A lump in her throat, Katie shook her head no and borrowed a phrase from Blair. “Your heart is big enough to love us both.”

  Molly walked toward her, slipped around Katie and looped her arms at Katie’s neck, then bent down and kissed her back.

  A well of tenderness rose from deep inside Katie, and she squeezed her eyes shut, struggling not to sob.

  “I wish you’d killed them.”

  Her daughter wanted peace for her mother and herself, and she wanted revenge. Katie understood wanting all of those things well. “The man who did that to me is dead.”

  “Is it his blood on the front?” She nodded to the sofa, signaling the unseen flight suit. “Did you kill him?” She eased around to see Katie’s face.

  “No, I didn’t. Another man did.” Katie shuddered. “He was good. He gave me food and made the doctor fix my legs. He gave me back my picture of you, Jake and your dad, and he helped me get rescued.” Tears slipped down Katie’s cheeks.

  Anger gleamed in Molly’s eyes. “I wish you could’ve killed the mean man.”

  Worried, trembling, Katie licked at her dry lips. “Molly, you don’t see all the things that happened there, do you?” Please, God
, let her say no. Please!

  She nodded that she didn’t. “The light gets in the way.”

  “The light?” Katie was lost.

  “It does that all the time. Whenever I’m not supposed to see something inside my head, it gets in the way so I don’t.”

  Thank God. “Is it someone, or just light?”

  “It’s love, Mom.” She frowned, looking at Katie as if she should know this. “Didn’t Grandma Grace explain it to you?”

  “Um, no, she didn’t,” Katie said. “But I don’t see or know things like you two do.”

  “Love is light,” Molly said. “It protects us and guards us and shields us all. Some of us can see it, some of us feel it, and some people don’t even know it’s there. But love is always there and it’s always doing its job.”

  Grandma Grace verbatim, Katie suspected. “I see.”

  “There’s a lot more, but if you don’t see and know, I don’t need to tell you.”

  “You and Grandma Grace have talked about this a lot, haven’t you?”

  She nodded. “We still do. That’s why Mom takes me to see her every three months. Grandpa thinks she doesn’t remember me every time, but she does inside.”

  “But her mind… How can you do that?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she admitted. “I just listen to her inside.” Molly tapped her heart. “When someone is sick, you hear with your ears, but you listen with your heart. They can still talk to you with their heart.”

  Katie couldn’t begin to figure that out and wasn’t sure what to say. “I’m glad she has you now.”

  “I still wish you’d killed the mean man. It would have helped.”

  “Helped what? How?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the light’s in the way.” She paused a second, then added, “That means you have to figure it out on your own. But it would help if you killed him.”

  So very much like her mother. And honestly, Katie had to admit, since discovering the rape had been real and not imagined, she’d wished she’d killed him herself, too. “Dead is dead, sweetheart.” Acceptance. Peace. Katie looked at Molly, took a leap of faith, and held out her arms.

  Molly stepped into them and Katie drew her daughter in and closed the circle, making it complete.

  Chapter Ten

  September gave way to October with more gardening days and pizza nights and games of goofy golf and trips to Big Kahuna’s water park. Katie studied the area with an eye to businesses and locations. Willow Creek sat on the Gulf of Mexico, Paxton Air Force Base was its biggest employer, and tourism was second. Snowbirds and inlanders flocked to the sugar white beaches for sun-drenched days and the relaxing sounds of the surf.

  While she’d once loved to surf and ride a boogie-board, since her return, Katie couldn’t make herself go to the beach. The beach meant sand—though logically she knew the sugar white substance wasn’t really sand, it just resembled it—and sand reminded her of the prison camp.

  Needing more time to work through that, she had kept her appointments with Dr. Muldoon, and to his credit he’d probed but not attempted to force her talk about her time in captivity. The nightmares were down to three or four a week, and other than the rape, she couldn’t tell if any of them were real memories—not that she’d been so foolish as to mention her not knowing to a soul, not even to C.D. With the divorce from Sam pending, she couldn’t risk a mental label interfering with her and her rights with her kids.

  C.D. had suggested that maybe by talking through everything that had happened to her, she would stop having the nightmares. But Katie knew that wouldn’t work. Merely thinking about any part of what she’d encountered there seemed to open the shutters in her mind and in her emotions, and every time she did, she consistently dreamed the horrific dreams. Real or imagined, when she dreamed, she lived them. Talking about them, focusing on them, would only make them worse.

  On a rainy day in Mid-October, she sat in Dr. Muldoon’s tiny waiting room, and weighed her options. It wasn’t as if she was playing ostrich, burying her head and pretending everything was rosy and nothing bad had happened in the tribal prison. She acknowledged every single bad thing that she remembered happening there, and every good thing, too—like General Amid positioning her in that market, paying that Frenchman so she’d be seen, recognized, and rescued. She didn’t deny the bad things. She just refused to accept as facts ones that could be imagined until proven, and to let the ones that had proven real ruin the rest of her life. She couldn’t reclaim the last six years, but she didn’t have to give the enemy another day, either.

  Okay, yes, she still had nightmares. But with time, the sharp edges would soften and dull, and the nightmares would fade. She had no illusions of forgetting them. She’d never forget what had happened there. But like when Ustead had raped her and she had watched it happen from a distance, with time, she would remember it all from a distance.

  What was wrong with that? How was that not healthy?

  When you go to the beach, Katie. When you can separate real from imagined and step into the sand and not resent and hate, then you’ll know the worst is over and you’re okay…

  An hour later, she officially separated from the air force, then stopped back by Dr. Muldoon’s office to officially say good-bye to him and Ashley, though she’d see Ashley socially the rest of her life.

  With their good wishes, she left and then drove down to the beach. If walking in the sand was what she needed to do for the worst to be over and to reclaim her life, then with the help of God that’s what she’d do. “He brought you to it, through it, and now He’ll bring you through this.”

  She pulled into the parking lot near the pier and shut off the engine. Her breaths grew rapid, her heart rate fast. Just take your keys and go, Katie.

  Her teeth sank into her lower lip. She pulled the keys from the ignition, her hand shaking, her palm sweaty.

  Just do it, Katie. It’s no big deal. Just walk out to the water’s edge and call this done. You’ll never have to look back to that time again.

  Desire to put the past to rest burned strong inside her. She blew out a steadying breath and reached for the door lock, her heart banging against her ribs, her pulse so strong in her head that the roar in her ears deafened her to everything going on outside. “Just do it, Katie. You can do it.”

  Lifting her hand, she pressed her fingertip against the lock and tried to push, but it didn’t move.

  She tried again.

  Nothing.

  She couldn’t make herself depress it and unlock the door.

  It’s too soon, God. It’s just too soon.

  Her mouth dust dry, she jammed the key into the ignition and cranked it. The engine roared to life and she hit the gas, whipped out of the parking lot and headed north, away from the sand.

  Away from the demons not yet ready to let go of her mind.

  By the third week of October, Katie felt more settled. Sam had shed some of his fear of losing the kids and had come around on sharing them. He, too, wanted what was best for them, and with urging from them and Katie—and no doubt, from Blair—he began acting like the man Katie had loved when they’d first met. It was odd, Katie told C.D. She would always love Sam because he was the father of her kids, but it still boggled her mind to know that if all that had happened never had happened, she might have lived her entire life and never known she hadn’t been in love with him. Wasn’t that just nearly impossible to believe?

  C.D. thought her realizing the truth was a blessing—he still considered Sam a selfish, self-centered jerk, but he didn’t say it aloud anymore. The kids respected their father and C.D. wanted them to continue to respect him. Unlike C.D.’s father, who had departed the fix when C.D. was seven and hadn’t been seen or heard from since, Sam showed up. In C.D.’s book, showing up was half of being a hero. Kids need heroes, and heroes start at home.

  Katie and C.D. were together all the time, as were Sam and Blair, thou
gh their long-term plans were clearer than Katie and C.D.’s own. As soon as Sam and Katie’s divorce was final, Sam and Blair would remarry. Katie had no idea what, if anything, C.D. saw in their future, and she didn’t intend to raise the topic for discussion and risk upsetting the status quo.

  Status quo with C.D. was richer and more fun and fulfilling than thirteen years of marriage to Sam. If what she and C.D. had now was all they ever had, for Katie, it was more than enough.

  Of course, how C.D. felt about that, she had no idea—and she had to work at not letting not knowing trouble her.

  That which is endured is conquered.

  “Katie,” C.D. came in through the back door. “What do you think of having a costume party at the bar on Halloween?”

  She dried her hands on a paper towel and tossed it into the trash. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll do it then.” He filled a glass with water from the fridge. “Still no list, eh?” He ran his fingertips down it’s bare front, looked to the countertop beside it where a pencil and pad lay waiting.

  “Not yet.” She lifted her chin. “I’m thinking about it more, though, now that tensions have eased up with Sam and the kids.”

  C.D. nodded. “That’s good.” He drank from the glass, set it on the counter next to the sink, and snagged her, then pulled her close. “You know, Angel, the only time you look truly at peace is when you’re in my arms or outside with your hands in the dirt.”

  Because he was right, she smiled and looped her arms at his shoulders. “That’s an odd way of putting it to a master gardener, C.D.”

  “Why? You connect with the dirt, not with the gardening,” he defended himself. “Willow Creek could use a good garden center. There are garden sections in the super-center stores, but there isn’t a dedicated garden center around.”

  “Your hints are about as subtle as sledgehammers.”

  He smiled. “Baby, I never said I was subtle.” He kissed her quickly twice, then moved away. “I’ve got to grab a fresh shirt.”

  “Hot date?”